Comment by micromacrofoot | Hacker News Reader

Comment by micromacrofoot | Hacker News Reader

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I suspect that many parents these days would not be comfortable with their child biking anywhere for an hour if they're under 14 or so. In the US I have found that things have changed dramatically for kids over the past 20-30 years.

Anecdotally I was walking half a mile to school in the second grade on my own. My nieces and nephews are the same age and aren't allowed to leave their yard (despite having cell phones!).

There's also the question of "why" — kids today are adept at video calls and tend to play lots of video games (many of which only have online multiplayer modes anyway!). They're generally not spending a lot of time playing outside. Their parents are also spending more time inside.

I'm sure there are a preponderance of reasons for the changes, but I've always suspected that the access to an infinite news cycle (e.g., some kid 2 hours away went missing last night) has made people overly cautious. This could be entirely anecdotal, but I feel like the world was a lot smaller for parents before the internet and this has altered perceptions (despite the fact that most places are actually safer in terms of violent crime rates than they used to be).

It has made people overly cautious, but in many ways the caution is well advised. Look at the rise in deaths from vehicles, driving under the influence, driving while distracted, the size of cars and how large/tall they are now. Even as an adult, you're likely to be met with animosity while riding your bike around, never mind a child. Increase of bicycle thefts, another reason. You can sort of see how a lot of these factors fuel each other, and put parents in a terrible position so that even if they weren't scared of the news cycle it doesn't logically make sense to willingly have their kids deal with such avoidable issues.

The weakening of communities has also made this much worse. Used to be you could play with the neighborhood just fine, if something happened one parent would tell the others or talk about it during a BBQ. Now, very little of that exists. There's so much animosity in communities. Leads to what this article is talking about, but things like NextDoor have made community building a sin. Everyone wants to be the snitch, the "community pillar" by becoming the epitome of a stereotypical no-fun-allowed police.

We've been living in apartments for ages now, yet we still struggle to make our neighbours that live 3 steps away, reliable friends. Everyone is just too busy, too distracted, too this or that. So I can't blame parents entirely for this dilemma we've created, we're all at fault at every level.

> I suspect that many parents these days would not be comfortable with their child biking anywhere for an hour if they're under 14 or so.

Yes, and this is also the result of negative aspects of media (in general, not just social). It's safer for kids to do this now than it has ever been (in the US, anyway), and yet so many parents think it's insanely dangerous. You even see parents scolding (and sometimes calling the cops on) other parents for letting their kids play outside.

It's insane.

Giving a kid a fully open cell phone (which is too often the case) is so much worse than letting them bike around the neighborhood, in terms of the predators it exposes them to. Unfortunately most parents don't seem to understand that.

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